Meta

Pages

There are literally hundreds of ways of doing this, with many offerings and services. I’m not claiming any of them to be the best – merely sharing the specific route that I followed – what worked for me, and what didn’t.

Register a domain

I used GoDaddy to register my domain (www.brucewaynehart.com). I paid 9.99 USD, which is annually renewable.

Hosting

I used Servage to host my domains. I paid 6.49 USD per month (I opted for the 6 month option, but will definitely renew after that). This includes 510GB of diskspace, 5010GB of data transfer per month, unlimited domains, virtual hosting, FTP, several useful automated installer scripts e.g. wordpress, mediawiki, openbook, etc.. and their response times are very good.

You will need to bring your domain across to your hosting provider – they will provide you with DNS settings (Name Servers) – that you will need to take back to the place where you registered your domain. You can also register a domain with servage, altho i only found that out later…

Site Statistics

I used StatCounter to monitor the traffic on my site. Its free, but offers a professional and really comprehensive service. Features include number of visits, number of distinct visitors, maps of visitors, statistics per site per day,week, month, etc.. It really provides all that I need.

Start a Blog

I uploaded the latest WordPress 2.5 to my servage host (you can use one of their existing installers, but they do not as yet provide the latest wordpress). Its very easy to upload a few themes and plugins, and you can be blogging away in minutes.

Content Duplication

Tempting though it may be to copy, or “steal content from other sites, don’t do it. The SEO’s are wise to it, and there are some very smart tools out there that can detect duplication in a whisker. They will penalise your site because of this which will harm your page rank, and ultimately affect the traffic to your site. Look at CopyScape as an example. Even changing words in a block of text doesn’t help – they’ve got really advanced tools out there.

provide as many links TO your site as possible e.g. from other blogs, social networks e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn. And the higher ranked they are, the better.

leave comments on other blog articles, making sure to leave a link back to your blog. please ensure that your comments are legit and sincere – no blogger likes a spammer leaving his trail of trash at the end of any of his articles…

advertise your blog – if you can make a mention in your company’s newsletter, the signature at the end of your emails, messages to user groups and forums, messages sent to your contacts in social networks, etc…

BUT PLEASE DON’T BECOME A SPAMMER!!!!!!!

Making Money

Googles Adsense is one of the leading ads programs out there. How does it work? Well first of all people will pay Google money to advertise their products. What Adsense does is to display relevant ads on your site, and Google will pay you for displaying these ads, or for when people click on ads on your site. Simple really. Admittedly its not that easy to make serious amounts of money – but you have to start somewhere.